Functional Approaches

There’s a great story about Ayoob creating his stress-fire combat shooting programs. Traditional shooting approaches required a complex 9-point body alignment that didn’t hold up under the stress conditions typically faced in lethal encounters. i.e. trained shooters would miss even at incredibly short range because their arms would shake, adrenalin would dump, and they couldn’t produce consistent, reliable application.

Ayoob simplified things down to a 3-point alignment, using alignment mechanics that were far more reliable under stress. The results looked very impressive.

Flashback – Kano, when vying for the position as instructor to the police forces, had to ready his team to compete against many other jujitsu coaches in Japan. Instead of teaching them “deadly” techniques they could never practice on each other with any degree of realistic resistance, he simplified. He removed anything that couldn’t be trained safely, yet repeatedly and applied against an unwilling, skilled, resistive opponent.

Rather than making the art “less deadly” due to missing so-called death techniques (or whatever), they attained similarly impressive results.

Flashback – Did the red junk boat actors, having to use their art to survive, attain a similar realization about simplicity and realistic, progressive, systematic training? Is that why WCK geometry is what it is? If we remove the mystic mumbo marketing jumbo and try to sweep away the return-to-complexity succeeding generations of humans often find necessary to re-impose on martial arts as they become further removed, is it possible? I think so.

Fundamentals aren’t martial arts specific, nor are they specific to martial arts. Stepping back, there seems to be readily discernible patterns to those who “discovered” how to teach functional skill to large groups of people (individuals don’t count — natural ability is too easy a distraction).

When I look for a coach, I seldom if ever care what story they have or even how good they are. I look to how efficiently they can make me good. The best coaches I’ve found make improvement almost immediate, and can get you doing what they can do very quickly. And they all tend to use the same or at least very similar methods to do it.